Free Republic

Glenn Youngkin, good man as he seems to be, is not a stand-in for active and engaged parents. If they leave the field, he will not succeed.Watch the video for a monologue followed by an interview with Russ Vought, former OMB director and current president of the Center for Renewing America, and Shaun Rieley, senior director for advancement and programs at The American Conservative, a doctor of political philosophy, and combat veteran of the War on Terror.Tuesday was one heck of a night in Virginia. Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe went from a sure thing to the Hillary Clinton of 2021...

There’s no nice way to say this, but somebody has to: There have been a lot of bad reactions on the right to the Afghanistan calamity.em>(Watch the video for the monologue and an interview with WMAL and The Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese on the how we can fix our foreign policy.)The war in Afghanistan is finally at its end. It was a catastrophe and a mess — a mess that some of us saw up close, a mess that some of us are still living through in Kabul — and a mess that cost many lives.There’s no nice way to...

We were treated to what at first appeared to be rare mea culpa this week as reporters read the Department of the Interior inspector general’s report on the riots and police response in Lafayette Park last summer and appeared shocked to find that the Park Police and Attorney General Bill Barr and even President Donald Trump were telling the truth when they said the crowd was going to be dispersed before police knew the president was thinking of coming down there.It’s rare to see what looks remotely like self-reflection in our self-obsessed corporate media, so it would be nice to...

The county paper predicted a crowd of 2,000-plus for President Donald Trump's 7 p.m. hangar stop. There are more than twice that many vehicles in the parking lots and fields by 4. LATROBE, Penn. — There are three roads to Arnold Palmer Regional Airport. The traffic jam stretches 1.5 miles into Unity Township, out a mile toward the country club, and eight miles toward Pittsburgh. Parking by a mailbox and hoping we don’t get towed, we hustle past as the red flag-waving line of packed cars, trucks, station wagons and occasional motorcycles creeps slowly onward toward this evening’s festivities.The...

Convention bets hard on hope Kamala pick will provide left-wing cover for sharp messaging return to the center. Vice President Joe Biden wrapped up the Democratic Convention Thursday night, putting an authentic and well-received closing argument at the end of an otherwise halting, depressing and frankly alien four-day rally, and previewing what may be the campaign’s calculation that a Kamala Harris VP provides left-wing cover for a rapid return to messaging from the Democratic Party’s political center. Biden used the 25-minute speech, delivered from an empty convention center in Wilmington, Delaware, to contrast President Donald Trump’s “darkness” with his own...

The first completely digital Democratic National Convention in American history kicked off Monday night, gifting CNN and MSNBC viewers two hours of the Democratic message, and CNN, MSNBC, and Fox viewers with all or much of the second hour. Designed to be part concert, part political commercial, and part digital pep rally, the evening contained easily recognized aspects of a normal rally as well as some surprising imagery for a 2020 Democratic Convention, but above all fell flat, coming across as both dour and canned, and suffering greatly from the absence of a boisterous crowd.Politicians giving speeches peppered with...

What are Pete Buttigieg’s politics?If you read CBS, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and a host of their friends, the former mayor is decidedly a moderate. According to The Washington Post and a few more, he’s “a traditional centrist” who embodies “the Democratic primary’s rightward drift.” And if you listen to the left-wing activists trailing him around, he’s “Wall Street Pete” and “will kill us.”His supposed moderation and support (almost solely) among white liberals torments Lucy, a white liberal who graduated high school more than a decade ago but writes for Teen Vogue. “Why I’m Not...

The staff, the ad spending, the campaigning -- Michael Bloomberg was going to do all of this to defeat President Donald Trump already. Doing it as a 'candidate' excempts him from limits on PACs and political donations. There is very good reason to believe Michael Bloomberg isn’t actually running for president.Of course, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For one, he declared he is. He’s also hired more than 1,000 staff and is still expanding, offering salaries far above campaign averages. This week, he became the first of the declared candidates to have campaigned in all 14 states...

That President Trump had to make this call, how, and the mortal danger to American assets it presents, illustrate exactly why U.S. forces should not spend a day longer in Iraq. President Donald Trump’s order to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad was the right call. At the same time, that he had to make this call, how he had to make it, and the mortal danger to American assets it presents, illustrate exactly why U.S. forces should not spend a day longer in Iraq than necessary to end our long-dwindling interests.Iran needed to learn a hard, swift lesson....